Students’ Well-Being and Academic Achievement: A Meta-Analysis Study

A considerable amount of literature has been published on students’ well-being, but empirical research has yielded ambiguous results regarding the relationship between well-being and academic achievement. Meta-analysis studies on this issue are scarce, and the available studies focus on a single domain of well-being. Meta-analyses investigating students’ general well-being and academic achievement are needed. To this end, we carried out a meta-analysis study on the association between students’ general well-being and academic achievement based on data from correlational studies involving 54,426 participants in 81 independent samples. We report a significant and positive but small effect size based on this dataset. The effect sizes differ significantly in terms of the moderator variables of publication year, age, school level, and publication type, while the correlation is robust across well-being domains, academic areas, scale types, and development levels of countries. Results are discussed and implications are suggested in line with the literature.